Home on a Half-Ruined Planet.

The planetary crisis we face may be made up of machinery and market
failures and sheer masses of humanity struggling to live, but I'm more
and more convinced that it is not at its core really a material crisis
at all. Rather, the planetary crisis is a crisis of vision; we
see a growing and darkening void where our future ought to be.
The average person, presented with accurate information about the state
of the world, can see no way forward at all. The path we're on appears
to end in darkness and a swift, cataclysmic drop. Most folks, entirely
understandably, choose not to look.

That void in our future vision, I believe, is not accidental. In the
40 years since the first Earth Day, a whole set of industries has grown
large attacking scientists and conservationists; falsely complexifying
issues; spinning the news of environmental crimes; launching astroturf
front groups; endowing think tanks; bribing politicians; obfuscating the
need for systemic change by pushing funding towards NGOs that advocate
the most limited of personal actions; and by promoting (in the most
direct financial sense) cultural work that promotes cynicism and a
disdain (if not a hatred) for idealists, from talk radio to teabagging.
In a twist on the old axiom that tyrants don't care if they are hated so
long as their subjects don't love each other, these industries don't
care if the future they're offering us looks dark, so long as no other
futures we can imagine look brighter. Despairing consumers still buy,
and they cause less trouble for the investing class. "We have an
economy," as Paul Hawken says, "where we steal the future, sell it in
the present, and call it G.D.P." Keeping the future dark hides the
crime.

Comments

The planetary crisis we face may be made up of machinery and market
failures and sheer masses of humanity struggling to live, but I'm more
and more convinced that it is not at its core really a material crisis
at all. Rather, the planetary crisis is a crisis of vision; we
see a growing and darkening void where our future ought to be.
The average person, presented with accurate information about the state
of the world, can see no way forward at all. The path we're on appears
to end in darkness and a swift, cataclysmic drop. Most folks, entirely
understandably, choose not to look.

That void in our future vision, I believe, is not accidental. In the
40 years since the first Earth Day, a whole set of industries has grown
large attacking scientists and conservationists; falsely complexifying
issues; spinning the news of environmental crimes; launching astroturf
front groups; endowing think tanks; bribing politicians; obfuscating the
need for systemic change by pushing funding towards NGOs that advocate
the most limited of personal actions; and by promoting (in the most
direct financial sense) cultural work that promotes cynicism and a
disdain (if not a hatred) for idealists, from talk radio to teabagging.
In a twist on the old axiom that tyrants don't care if they are hated so
long as their subjects don't love each other, these industries don't
care if the future they're offering us looks dark, so long as no other
futures we can imagine look brighter. Despairing consumers still buy,
and they cause less trouble for the investing class. "We have an
economy," as Paul Hawken says, "where we steal the future, sell it in
the present, and call it G.D.P." Keeping the future dark hides the
crime.